Google Retiring Adsense For Domains On April 18th, Run Typo Squatters Run!

Another day, another Google product shutting down. But this time, I am more than happy.

Google has decided to retire Adsense for domains, which means that Adsense publishers won’t be able to monetize parked domains using the Adsense for domains program after April 18th, 2012. There are a fewreports where existing Adsense publishers received the following email from Google Adsense team:

We’re contacting you because you’re using AdSense for Domains to monetize your undeveloped domains. After evaluating the benefits of our partner network, we’ve decided to retire the Hosted domains product within AdSense. Going forward, undeveloped domains will only be served through our existing AdSense for Domains distribution network.

Our records show that 7 of your Hosted domains will be affected by this upcoming change, which will follow the schedule below:

March 21: You’ll no longer be able to create new Hosted domains. April 18: Hosted domains will become inactive and it’ll no longer be possible to earn from them. June 27: Hosted domains will no longer be available in AdSense accounts

Other Adsense products e.g Adsense for content, Adsense for feeds and Adsense for search will continue to work normally. If you have a whole bunch of domains parked within your Google Adsense account, better move them to another parking provider as ads won’t be served after April 18th. On June 27th, all the hosted domains will be permanently removed from your Adsense account.

Google has put up a support page here, including a guide to migrate your hosted domains to another parking provider.

Being an Adsense publisher myself, I never found Adsense for domains very convincing. Unlike me, some savvy web publishers constantly try the “get rich quick” myth, buy tons of keyword domains in bulk and park them within their Adsense account. The result is nothing but an ad laden page, full of Adsense ads with absolutely no content, no links, no value. Nothing!

One idea, which I know worked wonders for many publishers is to buy misspelled domain names as early as possible, throw Adsense ads over it and forget about it. What really happens is that the publisher spends only $2-$5 in registering a domain name and waits to earn some revenue from “Garbage traffic”. Those who have mastered this art know that most of the typo-squatting sites will fail anyway but one of them will bring a decent amount of revenue.

Here is a brilliant example of another typo squatting site:

If you’re one of those Adsense publishers, I am afraid there isn’t any decent alternative which you can use after April 18th 2012. My advice: stop wasting time on keyword domains and do something worthwhile already.